Osteria Bancogiro, Venice

Now here, I'm afraid, is a classic example of style over substance. It's very nice to sit in a first floor brick vaulted dining room near the Rialto market, a babble of tourists drinking and taking cichetti below, the Christmas lights of the souvenir stalls twinkling across the campo. It's nice to gaze on a square white plate of salmon and fennel and pear, or a salad of duck ham, blue cheese and grapes. How about smoked tuna with aubergine and a pumpkin and cardamom sauce, or lamb with tarragon? They read well on the menu, they look good on the plate...if only they tasted of something!

I'm not trying to be unkind or harsh, really I'm not. There are lots of people on Tripadvisor who would say I'm an idiot, that the food here is the best they've ever tasted. (And four who would say I'm being too kind). So I'm prepared to think that we just came on a bad day. Maybe the chef had a cold and had lost his sense of taste. Maybe he had had his tongue cut out with a stiletto in a feud with with a gondolier over a beautiful woman. Well, you never know in Venice.

For whatever reason, he clearly wasn't tasting his food that day, and we paid over 100 euros for two plates each of mediocre dishes, eaten in beautiful but empty dining room. The wine was good though. Listen, don't let me put you off. Dozens of Tripadvisors can't be wrong (surely?), and I can be, easily, and often. But really, everything here was in very good taste; except the food.

Osteria Bancogiro, Campo San Giacometto, San Polo 122, under the porticoes, Venice, 30125

• 
  
• Tel 041 5232061
• 
  
• Osteria Bancogiro

Ca' Favretto, Venice

A room with a view of the Grand Canal: you'll pay a pretty price. But actually, the cost of our room at Ca' Favretto, which had this view from its window, was quite reasonable and the room was large and comfortable. Maybe it's because we were at the 'tradesman's' end of the canal, amongst the market and the post office rather than the galleries and palazzos and piazzas. But this is a convenient place to be: San Stae or Rialto Mercato vaporetto stops are just steps away, as is the Rialto bridge, and the traghetto across to San Marcuola gets you to Canareggio in minutes – if you master the art of standing up in a gondola.

The water laps and sucks at the hotel's canal frontage, and here is where you'll arrive if you have the taste to come by water taxi. Arrival on foot is a bit less salubrious, and more obscure, but not difficult if you're used to the anonymity of Venice's alleyways.

Breakfast was a good natured bun fight, in a room too small, or at least too narrow, for the number of guests, making for lots of polite giving way as people head for the fruit juice and coffee or return with a plate full of ham and cheese. A pity that, when we were there, it was too raw and cold to open the breakfast room doors out onto a balcony over the canal.


At night the noises from the canal were reassuring rather than disturbing. Vaporetti in the night and delivery barges in the early morning, bringing produce to the market. Not just a view, you see, but an ambient soundtrack too.


Residenza d'Epoca Ca' Favretto, Santa Croce, 2232 30135 - VENEZIA
Tel 041 52 41 768   


Hotel Ca' Favretto